In the digital age, organizations and other entities may manage increasingly large volumes of information assets (e.g. files, emails, etc.). Some organizations may deploy extensive data-management infrastructures for storing, organizing, protecting, and accessing their information assets. A typical organization's data-management infrastructure may include various data-management systems that enable the organization to search, identify, collect, and review the information assets that are stored across a variety of sources in the organization's IT infrastructure (e.g., personal computing devices, file servers, application servers, email servers, document repositories, collaboration systems, social networks, cloud-based storage services, etc.). For example, an organization may deploy an electronic-discovery system that enables the organization to search, identify, collect, and review its information assets as part of early case assessment in an electronic-discovery case.
Unfortunately, using conventional data-management systems to search for, identify, collect, and/or review a particular subset of an organization's information assets (e.g., the information assets of a particular custodian or information assets that have a particular classification) that are stored across a large number of disparate sources may present unwanted limitations. For example, conventional electronic-discovery systems may consume a considerable amount of time scanning information-asset sources within an organization's IT infrastructure in order to build an index of information assets and their metadata (e.g., ownership attributes, location attributes, classifications, etc.) against which a particular information-asset search may be performed.
In addition, the information-asset searches that are performed by conventional electronic-discovery systems may be error prone because the indexes of conventional electronic-discovery systems often do not include all information assets within an organization's IT infrastructure (e.g., as a result of a missed information-asset source) and/or all necessary information-asset metadata for performing searches (e.g., as a result of some information-asset metadata being unavailable via certain information-asset sources). Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies and addresses a need for additional and improved systems and methods for aggregating and utilizing information-asset metadata from multiple disparate data-management systems.